Facebook hires AI expert, launches lab in Canada's Montreal

TORONTO - Facebook Inc has hired artificial intelligence academic Joelle Pineau to head its new research lab in Montreal, the Silicon Valley social media company said on Friday.

Once the exclusive domain of academic researchers, artificial intelligence has grabbed the attention of the corporate world as businesses from healthcare to financial services look to use algorithms to sort through reams of data in search of patterns to solve problems.

The lab will be Facebook's fourth, after sites in Palo Alto, New York, and Paris, and joins similar AI research efforts in the city from Microsoft Corp and Alphabet's Google.

The company will also invest $7 million to support AI research at academic institutions in Montreal, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research said in a statement.

Pineau is a co-director of McGill University's Reasoning and Learning Lab whose work focuses on developing and applying models and algorithms applying robotics to healthcare, transportation and language processing.

One project she has been working on at McGill, where she will maintain her academic position, is a robotic wheelchair.

Pineau will be joined by fellow researchers Pascal Vincent, Michael Rabbat and Nicolas Ballat, and Facebook expects the team to grow to around 30 researchers.

Facebook already uses AI for image recognition, language analysis and targeted advertising. It also uses AI to identify and remove what the company deems "inappropriate content."

The Facebook project will be connected to McGill University's Centre for Intelligent Machines and to the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, started by University of Montreal professor and machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, two sources with knowledge of the plans said.

Combined, University of Montreal and McGill have more than 200 researchers, including students, working on AI research projects, Bengio said. That is up from around 150 cited by Google last year, which it called the greatest academic concentration of AI research in the world.

The mostly French-speaking province of Quebec boasts around 90 start-up companies focused on artificial intelligence.

The Canadian federal government has pledged C$125 million to build AI expertise in Montreal, the Toronto-Waterloo corridor, and Edmonton, while the provincial Quebec government has also promised some C$100 million ($82 million) specifically for AI research. — Reuters

Heart attacks often misdiagnosed as anxiety in women: study

OTTAWA - Women are more likely to die of heart attacks because their symptoms are often misdiagnosed as anxiety so they do not get vital swift treatment, said a study Monday.

Researchers at McGill University in Montreal set out to understand sex differences in mortality rates for men and women with acute coronary syndrome.

They asked 1,123 patients aged 18 to 55 to fill out a survey after being admitted to one of 24 hospitals in Canada, one in the United States and one in Switzerland.

The women in the study, the researchers found, generally came from lower income brackets, were more likely to have diabetes, high blood pressure and a family history of heart disease.

They also had substantially higher levels of anxiety and depression than the men.

The researchers noted that the men received faster access to electrocardiograms (ECGs) to check heart rhythms and fibrinolysis to prevent blood clots than the women.

Early treatment for a heart attack can prevent or limit damage to the heart muscle, while saving the person's life.

On average it took 15 minutes and 28 minutes, respectively, for men to be given ECGs or fibrinolysis from the time they arrived at an emergency room.

In contrast, it took 21 minutes and 36 minutes for women.

The researchers pointed to the women's higher levels of anxiety as the primary reason for the discrepancy.

"Patients with anxiety who present to the emergency department with non-cardiac chest pain tend to be women, and the prevalence of acute coronary syndrome is lower among young women than among young men," said lead researcher Louise Pilote.

"These findings suggest that triage personnel might initially dismiss a cardiac event among young women with anxiety, which would result in a longer door-to-ECG interval."

The findings were published in the current issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. — Agence France-Presse

source: gmanetwork.com